4) People tend to be more outraged when children are abused than when the old or disabled are. That’s not an anti-Catholic bias, but more of a natural one. (That’s not to defend it!)

5) That Catholic priests abuse children and that the hierarchy covers for them has been well-known for decades, if not centuries. That there is this level of abuse going on in NYS is news to me and I am, in fact, just as outraged.

There’s an order of magnitude problem lurking in there to grapple with.

Indeed there is. Notice that among the ‘abuses’ listed are things that range from bad (sex and physical abuse) to “taunting”. This is then set in comparision to Priest sexual abuse allgations. Of the 10K or so charges that had an overal law enforcement referral rate of about 5%, how many were for things like ‘taunting’ and how many were for actual sex abuse? More importantly what was the reporting rate for the more serious charges like sex abuse versus less serious ones?

Now if you’re going to go here, then make it apples to apples. You’re going to have to assemble not just an estimate of how many sex abuse incidents happened with Catholic clergy in the last 50 years, but also incidents of physical attacks and ‘taunting’. Considering the reputation Catholic school nuns had as school disciplinarians (at least ‘old school’ nuns), I’m not sure you really want to bark up that tree.

Boonton,
I didn’t attend a Catholic school, but are you really contending that the ‘old school’ disciplinarian nuns were sexually motivated. Get real.

Pretend for a moment that these two figures are comparable … the news coverage is not. That in turn is the problem or the center of the hypocrisy.

JA,

That there is this level of abuse going on in NYS is news to me and I am, in fact, just as outraged.

Exactly. And the hypocrisy is not centered with you but with the media/coverage.

This harkens back a little to the Personal Knowledge observation in the Polanyi philosphy of science book. There is not data without theory in this case leads to no story (hence no knowledge of abuses) without a theory.

Who said anything about sexual motivation? The charges of abuse ranged from sex to physical abuse to taunts when it came to social workers. Likewise, then, if you want to compare to Catholic clergy you can’t just tally up sex charges.

Likewise if you just want to focus on ‘reporting to police’ you’d still want to make an apples to apples comparision. At what rate were sex abuse charges by priests reported to police versus sex abuse charges by social workers? By including a category like ‘taunts’ which might be illegal in a few cases but in many cases may just be a management problem for social workers but not priests…..well it looks like the blogger is more interested in trying to find spin for the Catholic Church rather than looking at something honestly.

And that’s ironic because if you really wanted to support the Church you’d tell them to do what any other large organization should do when it discovers it really f*ked up. Come clean, make amends and learn from the mistakes.

Pretend for a moment that these two figures are comparable … the news coverage is not. That in turn is the problem or the center of the hypocrisy.

So let’s see how this works. If the two were comparable, then with fair media the coverage would be comparable. The coverage wasn’t comparable, but wait the figures aren’t comparable. No problem, let’s just pretend they are comparable.

Have you tried implementing this trick on your customer service calls?

“It doesn’t work”.

“No it doesn’t, but pretend it does. In that case you got your money’s worth so why are you complaining?”

well it looks like the blogger is more interested in trying to find spin for the Catholic Church rather than looking at something honestly.

It’s highly likely that the (US Protestant) has more dislike for Catholics than JA. 😀 He’s highly unlikely to be “covering” for the Catholics.

The coverage wasn’t comparable, but wait the figures aren’t comparable. No problem, let’s just pretend they are comparable.

Right. It’s more likely (it seems to me) that the instances of real abuse are many times greater on the social worker worker side and the coverage has been about nil. So, you’re right, to play fair with the media we shouldn’t pretend they are.

Many times greater on the social worker side? Probably not to be honest with you. For one thing social workers are not united in a single organization like priests are. Social workers work for hundreds of state and local gov’ts of varying quality. The Catholic Church, in contrast has a global organization.

The same qualities that work in favor of an organization when it’s doing good things work also in its favor when doing bad. If bad social workers are the norm in county A or state A there’s no particular connection to state B, C, D, let alone countries A, B, C etc. For example there’s no social worker from, say, Detroit, facing sex charges hiding out in Italy via the diplomatic priviledges accorded an International Club of Social Workers. A global organization can take both its ‘best practices’ and ‘worst practices’ and make them a global norm.